The Tommy Curry Situation

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes about the fallout from a controversy that started on this blog, when I started paying attention to racially charged public rhetoric employed by Texas A&M philosophy professor Tommy Curry. The first blog entry I posted was on May 8, following an anonymous reader tip saying that they (the reader) found it unfair that the university denounced white nationalist Richard Spencer’s appearance on campus, but allows Dr. Curry to get away with blatantly anti-white rhetoric.

I did a Google search, and came upon a 2012 podcast interview he gave, in which he discussed black violence against whites from a historical context. Here’s a portion of it. He’s talking about the days of slavery and Jim Crow:

Now remember that these black people were actually in a world very much like ours today where white vigilantism against black people, murder, state violence, were all deemed normal. This was how you preserved American democracy. This is what Ida B Wells talks about. You lynched black people because they’re an economic threat to white, poor whites getting businesses. You lynched black people to show black people that they can never be equal, so they will never challenge you, they will never pursue politics, they would have never pursued the right to vote.

So when we have this conversation about violence or killing white people, it has to be looked at in the context of this historical turn.

And the fact that we’ve had no one address like how relevant and how solidified this kind of tradition is for black people, saying “look, in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die.”

I’ve just been immensely disappointed, because what we look at, week after week, is the national catastrophe after catastrophe where black people, black children, are still dying. And we are front row, we’re front and center, when it comes to white people talking about their justification for owning assault weapons and owning guns to protect themselves from evil black people and evil immigrants.

But when we turn the conversation back and says, “does the black community ever need to own guns, does the black community have a need to protect itself, does the black individual have a need to protect itself from police officers,” we don’t have that conversation at all.

“In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die,” he said. And he was right about that, in a sense. That’s why we had a Civil War, in which 620,000 Americans on both Union and Confederate sides gave their lives to defeat slavery.

Anyway, I have no argument at all with black people, or any other people, facing vigilantism, murder, and illicit state violence (because the state has a right to deploy violence under certain conditions) using lethal force to defend themselves. And I believe in the Second Amendment right to bear arms; it applies to all Americans, regardless of their color. The problem here is the idea that today, in 2017, we are in a world “very much like” the days of slavery or even the Jim Crow South. And, in turn, that talk about black people killing white people — including police officers — for the sake of equality is a conversation to be encouraged.

If this were a one-off with Dr. Curry, that would be one thing. But he indulges in racially charged rhetoric all the time. More from that post:

In this interview with a blogcast called Context Of White Supremacy (slogan: “White People Are The Problem”), Curry argues that whites cannot be ignorant of racism (their own or anyone else’s) and that black people who assume that whites are educable on racism are fools. He puts down different black theorists, including Martin Luther King, for actually thinking that white people can be regarded as reasonable. It’s a remarkable thing: a philosophy professor who denies that a people are capable of rational thought because of their race.

In this talk, Curry denounces the “integrationist” model of race relations, and describes the black-white relationship as one of power. “White people don’t want to question their physical life and certainly not their own racial existence,” he says. “Because that means they would have to accept that death could come for them at any moment, the same way non-white people have to accept that. And they don’t want to question their existence, they’re not willing to give up their existence. They’ll hold on to their white life just as much as a [unclear] will hold on to a crack pipe. They are fundamentally addicted to the purity of what they see whiteness to be.”

What does any of this racist bilge mean? To prove his own human worth to Tommy Curry, a white person has to despise himself? Good luck with that, Tommy Curry.

What if a white professor gave an interview to a podcast that advertised its belief that “Black People Are The Problem”? That professor would never work in academia again. We all know that.

I think the Chronicle report is generally fair, but you don’t get this context at all. And it’s really important. From a second blog post of mine

You can find all kinds of talks online from Tommy Curry trashing white people and black people who are insufficiently radical (e.g., “Stop Absolving White Folks”). In that talk, Curry condemns progressive white academics who criticize whites for the way they have treated Native Americans.

“Contemporary white feminists pretend that they can simply converse [sic] these ideas without consequence,” Curry says. In other words, shut up, white woman, because your skin color makes you guilty. Curry goes on to say that white feminists allow the “academic-industrial complex” to “pimp out oppression,” and that “white people and whiteness” are “responsible for the genocide” against Native Americans, “and continue to enforce today as a slavetocracy [sic] against African descended people.”

Tommy Curry believes that black Americans today live under a “slavetocracy.” He said so. And he thinks black Americans ought to be thinking about the historic example of armed black people who were prepared to use lethal force to protect themselves in a time when white people were allowed to terrorize them with impunity.

What if a white philosophy professor talked in an interview about how white Gentiles live under the boot of the Zionist Occupation Government (a common anti-Semitic trope), talked about how the use of lethal violence to overthrow all manifestations of that oppressive order was justified, and said we ought to be talking about this stuff? How well do you think that would go over? How long do you think that professor would have a job?

Tommy Curry seems to believe that he can “converse these ideas without consequence.” The thing is, he actually wants to provoke whites. Here’s what his graduate adviser — an admirer of Curry’s — told the Chronicle:

“He would say at times that he liked nothing more than pissing white people off,” says Mr. Stikkers. “I think he did get a certain thrill from that.”

Well, sure he did — because the more provocative his rhetoric, the more valuable he was academically. The Chronicle story talks about Curry appearing before an A&M panel after the “Killing Whites” controversy blew up:

That morning, the dean of Texas A&M’s liberal-arts college asked Mr. Curry to meet with administrators. The professor agreed but told them he wanted another person of color in the meeting. He didn’t want to feel surrounded by people who didn’t get it.

At the meeting, Mr. Curry says, he got the impression that university officials wanted to draw a distinction between his radio commentary and his work for Texas A&M.

Mr. Curry stood his ground. He told the university officials there was no difference. Earlier in the year, a panel of judges from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy honored Mr. Curry’s radio work by giving him an award for public philosophy. (“Our committee was impressed,” wrote the chair of the panel, “by how seamlessly Dr. Curry is able to fuse his work as a professional academic philosopher with a very public and intellectually rigorous engagement with lay audiences across a variety of platforms.”)

His radio commentary wasn’t some offbeat rant, the professor told his bosses. This is part of what you hired me to do.

To be honest, I think he’s probably right that this is what they hired him to do. Curry has never tried to hide what he believes. One of the first papers on his Academia.edu page is this one (screen shot from the paper):

“Violence Against Whiteness”? There is no such thing as violence against an abstraction called “whiteness”. There is violence against white people.

Despite the international community’s criticisms of U.S. racism and the denial of self-determination to people of African descent, there have not been any political sanctions or international reprimands for these human rights violations. As such, African people in the United States must start to speak of and act on political alternatives that are not rooted in the eventuation of white sympathy for the “human condition” of Blacks; instead, our political theories must deal with the reality of white imperialism and the apathy of the international community to the concretization of Black self-determinacy.

Emphasis mine. Here, near the paper’s beginning, he is saying that he intends for black people not just to talk about this stuff, but to do something about it. More:

In an attempt to move Black political theory in this direction, this essay explores the use of violence as a solution to the permanent institutionalization and white cultural reiﬁcation of anti-Black racism. In African American political thought, integration and the hopes of non-violent progress has become the unquestioned foundation of Black political and legal theory. This author believes that the dogmatic allegiance to non-violence is a price that African descended people in America can no longer afford to pay. Historically, the use of violence has been a serious option in the liberation of African people from the cultural tyranny of whiteness, and should again be investigated as a plausible and in some sense necessary political option.

Again, emphases mine. Curry goes on to write in the paper that black theorists in the past have thought about these questions in universalist terms, to appeal to the reason of whites, but that he, Tommy Curry, does not care what white people think. His paper, he writes, “is not swayed by the qualitative difference of white opinions or white perceptions of anti-Black racism.” More:

In section I, I argue that Hurricane Katrina provides insight into the white racial framing of the race problem in America in such a way that exposes both the permanent racist context of the United States political system and the refusal of the white population to constructively engage the race question. Given the epistemological frame of white racial identity, I am trying to question if it is the case that the only way to end racism is to challenge the existence of those whose breaths of life sustain the racist structure.

Emphases mine. So, Curry begins with the premiss that America is irredeemably racist, and whites don’t want to talk about it. The paper wants to know if killing whites, or threatening to kill whites (given their alleged refusal to “constructively engage”), is the only way to end racism.

Curry asserts as a fact that the US is engaged in “the systemic genocidal elimination of our people” — a hysterical claim, I would say, but an important one to his case. Would not the Jews of Germany and Poland have been justified in taking up arms against Germans in an attempt to derail the trains to Auschwitz? Most people (including me) would say yes, I’d wager. Curry doesn’t explain why, exactly, black Americans are living in conditions like Jews under Nazi authority; he just asserts it as if it were an obvious fact. If it is true, then of course violence as self-protection and self-deliverance has to be on the table. But if it is not the case that there is an ongoing anti-black genocide in America, then to speak of it as if it were a fact is extremely irresponsible. It is the equivalent of white racists telling poor white people that all their problems are because Jews and blacks are trying to eliminate them.

He goes on:

This sustained aversion against Blacks justiﬁes violence. The need for whites toprotect the conditions that sustain “whiteness” constructs the encounter with “aBlack” as a danger. Violence against “the Black” is justiﬁed on the basis of thisexclusion. It is the African descended person in America that suffers from theorder attained through the legal mob violence against Black communities in thiscountry. Democracy is believed to work at an affordable price in this country, atthe price of African descended people’s lives, which is rationalized by whites as nothing more than the necessary elimination of the dangers Blacks pose to white communities.

The commitment that whites have shown to the preservation of their oppressive historical legacy of civilization and the protection of the ideals that sustain the racist American society demonstrates the fundamental aversion whites have to African descended people.

Read that closely. Curry is saying that our political order is upheld at the expense of black suffering — as if the United States in 2007 (when the paper was written) is no different than the Confederacy, circa 1861. And he says that white people cannot change — presumably because we are white, and that fact makes us immune to reason or empathy.

Writes Curry:

The question placed before the African thinker in the United States is the same question posed to our ancestors, “what are African people to do given the unrelenting assault on our lives in America?”

He will not let up on the evilness of whites:

White socialization reproduces white ways of life, white values, and an ideology of white superiority engrained in the narratives and history of American society. Even causal analyses of racial events in American society are framed in ways that uphold white sensibilities of justice and fairness, especially when those events would imply racism as the cause. Empirically, whites will not lend Blacks their ear.

This is extraordinary stuff. What, exactly, are “white ways of life” and “white values”? Am I reading a white nationalist tract? It is not empirically true that no whites will sympathize with and ally with blacks. But Curry needs to believe this to justify violence against whites. In fact, he declares himself to be an advocate of “racial realism” — seriously, it’s on page 145 of the paper! And you thought it was just white people enamored of HBD who believed that reality can only be understood through the lens of race.

I’m sorry to be quoting large swatches of this paper, but you get very little of this in the Chronicle story. Here’s more:

According to Paul Butler, “the issue is not whether people will suffer and die.African Americans suffer and die now, because of race based punishment. The issues, then, are whether or how that discrimination should end, and whether it matters if others die, in the service to end discrimination.” However, the issue is precisely over who dies. Butler claims that violence needs to be proportionate to the kind of discrimination committed and should not harm innocent people or what he refers to as “noncombatants,” but how can we decide how much oppression is tolerable and who is innocent under a colonial system? What is the threshold for dehumanization, what is the normal amount of genocide allowable? Butler assumes that discrimination can be weighed as abnormal variations in the American landscape, despite its perpetual reoccurrence. While this argument seems compelling it ignores the fundamental truth of the American colonial context, namely that the murder of Blacks appears normal, and as such does not constitute a premise for rejecting the system or punishing those whites responsible for the death of Blacks. Fanon tells us that there are no innocents in the colonial situation. “Colonialism is not a type of individual relation but the conquest of a national territory and the oppression of a people: that is all.”

The colonial context justifies itself to whites in the persecution and criminalization of Blacks, and in this way it knows that it is legitimate and permanent. Every white that participates in the colonial context, as if the tyranny against Blacks is the norm, and acceptable, in so far as it requires no individual action or culpability, is guilty of colonization, and as such is neither innocent nor absolved for being the particular manifestation of the colonial matrix. The possession of a white racial identity is a very real danger for African people insofar as that identity is embraced as the badge of white superiority.In this sense, every white is a concrete threat to the life of an African descended person, either as their executioner or the enforcer of white supremacy. Insofar as “whiteness” is the expectation of privilege, whiteness is also the expectation of those who cannot enjoy those privileges and the maintenance of their deprivation. Violence against whites is a revolt against both the colonial structures of the American context, as well as the rebellion against the individual whites who choose to claim the legacy of that oppression in a white racial identity.

Shorter Tommy Curry: There are no individuals, only groups. There are no innocent whites. All whites are tyrants. Extremism — including violence — in offense against whites is no vice.

And, this quote from the piece: “Violence is anger realized as liberation.”

Here is the paper’s conclusion:

Do we (African descended people) advocate the death, murder, poverty, and oppression of our people at the hands of whites, or do we advocate the end of racism, even if the means to do so is war? The dissenters to such a view will no doubt support the basis of violence against whites as theoretically, and politically justified, but reject the proposal on the basis of practicality or morality.

Here the criticisms that violence against whites will increase white racism, that violence against whites will inevitably harm more Blacks than our current oppression, that violence is simply not a promising political alternative for Black, or that violence against whites would make oppressed Blacks no better than the white oppressor are largely ideological co-signers to the
maintenance of the status quo. These criticisms only maintain the current conditions of Blacks now. Blacks are dying daily from poverty, police brutality and incarceration. Where are the objections to these realities? Is there an ontological difference between the deaths of Blacks that appear normal, and the deaths that appear abominable because they occurred in the midst of revolt? Does our willingness to be moral agents that seek to educate whites and live together peacefully arrest the murder of Black people? The reality of Blacks, especially Black men in American society, is that death is always imminent. Ultimately, the death of Blacks, be it at the hands of white supremacy, or in rebellion against colonialism, should advocate the unrealized possibility of their living, namely the end of racism.

How can anyone read that paper — see the whole thing here — and conclude that Tommy Curry is not advocating anti-white violence, but simply talking about it as a philosophical hypothetical?

Now, let’s get back to the Chronicle story, where they’re talking about this very paper:

The paper was published in Radical Philosophy Today, and Mr. Curry put it on his curriculum vitae. Two years later, he earned his doctorate from Southern Illinois, and Texas A&M brought him on as a “diversity hire,” he says. The university’s philosophy department, like philosophy departments everywhere, was all white. “They sold it to me based on the idea that they were trying to change,” he says.

Black philosophers are rare in academe. In 2013 a group of researchers counted 141 black professors, instructors, and graduate students working at U.S. colleges, accounting for about 1 percent of the field. At Texas A&M, Mr. Curry turned heads almost immediately. In 2010 he taught a course that used hip-hop as a lens into philosophical ideas. The rapper 50 Cent was on the syllabus alongside Thomas Hobbes.

Texas A&M hired Curry to teach philosophy, knowing that he believes these things. Even Curry says he was hired because of his race, and what his racialist perspective would add to the philosophy department. In that paper, by the way, Curry denounces European philosophy as thoroughly racist. Why would the Texas A&M philosophy department hire a professor who openly states that he believes the thing to which most of them have given their life’s work is intrinsically evil? That’s a question that the Chronicle of Higher Education does not ask.

Here’s the Chronicle‘s account of Curry’s recording the 2012 podcast with his friend Rob Redding:

Once again, conjuring visions of black-on-white violence would be risky. The audience this time was not subscribers to Radical Philosophy Today. It was the public airwaves and the internet. “He knew that saying that, on its face, would be controversial,” says Mr. Redding. They decided the professor should focus on self-defense.

When it came time to record the segment, Mr. Curry spoke without a script.

“When we have this conversation about violence or killing white people, it has to be looked at in the kind of these historical terms,” he said.

“And the fact that we’ve had no one address, like, how relevant and how solidified this kind of tradition is, for black people saying, ‘Look in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people may have to die.’ I’ve just been immensely disappointed, because what we look at, week after week, is national catastrophe after catastrophe where black people, black children, are still dying.”

White conservatives speak reverently of gun rights, said Mr. Curry. “But when we turn the conversation back and say, ‘Does the black community ever need to own guns? Does the black community have a need to protect itself? Does the black individual have a need to protect himself from police officers?’ We don’t have that conversation at all.”

The segment aired, and nothing happened. Mr. Redding posted Mr. Curry’s piece on YouTube in December 2012 with the title “Dr. Tommy Curry on killing whites,” then forgot about it.

Again, consider a white professor at TAMU giving an interview to a podcaster, in which it was (accurately) billed as “Dr. [name] on killing blacks”. What kind of reaction would that receive? What should people think of it? What should students? Administrators? Texas taxpayers, who fund this public university?

Here’s the Chronicle‘s account of Curry explaining himself before a TAMU panel:

The professor wrote in the third person, assuming that his bosses would adopt his voice as their own.

The professor continued: “Dr. Curry, drawing from the Second Amendment tradition, suggests that the law’s failure to protect the lives of Black, Latino, and Muslim Americans requires new conversations which may require self-defense and more radical options than protest. In no way does his work promote or incite violence toward whites or any other racial group.”

Nonsense. The headline was entirely accurate. The point of Curry’s discourse, as in his 2007 paper, is precisely to answer that question. What is inflammatory is not the headline, but Curry’s thesis. Curry is bringing in Latinos and Muslims, whom he had not mentioned earlier, in an apparently effort to draw intersectional allies to his cause. If Curry’s paper does not promote or incite violence towards whites, then what does it do? He says at the beginning that he wants to raise the question of when violence against whites in the cause of black “liberation” is justified, and then answers it clearly: under the conditions blacks are living in America right now.

Here, also from the Chronicle, is an interesting passage:

Perhaps the most scathing rebuke to the [TAMU] president came in a letter signed by every faculty member in the Africana-studies department, where Mr. Curry also holds a faculty appointment. The history of black thought, they said, includes more than Martin Luther King Jr.’s crossover hits. By dismissing Mr. Curry’s comments on violent resistance as “personal views,” they said, Mr. Young had delegitimized the professor’s expertise and dismissed centuries of history.

“Blacks in the United States live with the daily fear that a traffic stop, or a trip to the store or the park, could be the end of their lives,” wrote the professors. “Yet we cannot talk about black resistance? Historically or contemporaneously? Are you aware that Dr. Curry’s work falls within a longstanding epistemological tradition in black diaspora and colonial studies?”

There is nothing at all wrong with studying and theorizing about the use of violence in racist or colonialist societies. I agree that violence can be justified under certain conditions. That’s not what I criticized. What I criticized is Curry’s argument saying that it ought to be deployed in the United States now (“African people in the United States must start to speak of and act on”) — because there is a black “genocide” going on, and whites cannot be reasoned with.

What’s so interesting to me about the academics’ reaction is the assumption that really radical, even racist, statements can and should be made by professors, and that there should be no angry reaction to them — provided that the professor making the statement is a member of one of the favored victim classes. Here is a philosophy professor at a public university making public statements, both in published writing and on Internet broadcasts, in which he advocates for lethal violence against white people on the basis of their guilt for being white. How the hell did he expect white people to react? Like a bunch of liberal academics who see no enemies on the Left? Like the jelly-spined college administrators who have been collapsing in the face of radical student demands?

Notice that this started only in 2015, when suddenly newspapers were filled with stories of college administrators capitulating to student radicals. People aren’t wrong to wonder what’s wrong with colleges that, for example, hire philosophy professors who denounce all European philosophy as racist (because white people came up with it), and who lay down the theoretical justification for anti-white violence.

I wish the Chronicle of Higher Education had asked these questions as part of the overall story.

A couple of minor things. The Chronicle story says

Mr. Dreher didn’t see Django Unchained, he said, because revenge fantasies were corrupting.

That’s partly true. I don’t watch graphically violent films as a rule. I hate graphic violence. The revenge fantasy thing is true as well. I came to that conclusion after being undone by my own abiding anger over the Catholic abuse scandal, furious over what happened, and over the fact that justice was not being done, and would not be done in most cases. I actually wrote something on NRO in which I justified an abuse victim shooting and wounding a Catholic priest who was allegedly his abuser. I was wrong to have done that. It scared me to see how powerful my anger was — not only in that case, but looking back on the way I dealt with (or failed to deal with) my rage at the injustice to victims of abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Revenge-fantasy movies can be a kind of pornography to me, and I need to avoid them.

I want to share with you some broader context of my exchanges with the Chronicle reporter, Steve Kolowich. Our interviews were done entirely by e-mail. I prefer that, because that way I have a solid record of what was said by both sides. From a June 22 e-mail I sent to him, in which I’m talking about the initial complaint from the anonymous Texas A&M reader who tipped me off to Tommy Curry’s statements:

I get these kinds of things all the time. The reader was irked in part over a perceived double standard regarding the white nationalist Richard Spencer, who was banned from campus or something like it, versus Curry, who was saying many of the same racial things, but as a black man. I have a special interest in that kind of thing because I’ve been writing for a long time now that the left has no idea what kind of demons it is calling up by valorizing racialist rhetoric from a non-white point of view. It is only natural that whites will eventually resent the hell out of the double standard, and come to believe that what people like Spencer say is valid. For some reason, the campus left (students and professors) cannot grasp this point.

I have received more than a few letters from readers over the past couple of years — grad students mostly, but also professors — saying that they are completely sick of the progressive bullying, and that they are finding themselves wishing to get the hell out of academia. They see no future for themselves there. Some of them, though, are starting to become more sympathetic to the alt-right’s arguments.

Kolowich responded by telling me in detail about some of the extreme rhetoric used by fringe fanatics who had read my Tommy Curry post, and reacted in vile, disgusting ways. On June 23, I responded:

Most of this is news to me. I had no idea that fringe sites had picked up the story. Of course I hate that anything I write would be used for hateful purposes by anybody, and I denounce in the strongest possible terms threats of violence against Curry. But all journalists — and for that matter, anyone who writes on the Internet — run the risk that some villain or nut will take the information they publish and use it maliciously.

In that same e-mail, I wrote:

Steve, I hope when and if you write about it, you will follow up with Curry and ask him if these audio clips below are true, and if so, what was he thinking when he said those things.

R. (read on)

New Recordings Released of Texas A&M Professor Telling Students Violence Against White People Necessary for Progress, Likes to See Such Violence on TV

Support Aggies started an online petition at SupportAggies.com, calling for Professor Curry and Texas A&M President Michael Young to be fired. The petition, which will be sent to the Texas A&M System Chancellor and Regents, reads in part: “Academic freedom should never be extended to faculty that intentionally incite violence, especially racially-motivated violence, regardless of the race targeted. While such views may and often should be studied, they should never be promoted by faculty and staff. Any university employee who promotes such a view should be fired. And any university leader who allows such a view to be promoted should likewise be fired.”
Last week, a video surfaced of Curry appearing on a podcast from 2012 where he said, “In order to be liberated, some white people may have to die.” President Young responded by saying, “the interview features disturbing comments.” Young declined to take any action against Curry.
According to The Eagle, Texas A&M communications officer Amy Smith said that “Texas A&M has a policy against faculty or staff expressing inflammatory views while in a university-affiliated context.”

Curry told The Eagle on Friday, “At no point did I advocate violence of any kind. I have a major problem with the way my remarks have been framed. This wasn’t…me expressing my personal opinion…. It was part of a scholarly analysis. That’s an important distinction. I was making a historical point.”

Support Aggies released the following statement:

“The audio recordings released by Support Aggies completely contradict Professor Curry’s claim that he merely makes scholarly analyses of the violent viewpoints of historical figures. It’s clear from the recordings that Curry personally and seriously agrees that violence against whites is necessary for black progress and would enjoy seeing such violence on television. If any professor were promoting violence against blacks as blatantly as Curry does against whites, Texas A&M would rightly fire him in a heartbeat. It should be no different for Curry.”

I don’t know if Kolowich asked Curry if those recorded remarks were his, and if so, how he justified them. There’s nothing in the Chronicle story about them. The voice on the recordings sounds like Curry’s. Did a Texas A&M philosophy professor say these things — that he watches the news hoping to see whites being beaten, and that racial progress today requires violence — or did he not? Isn’t that significant? The A&M-affiliated person who first contacted me about Curry said in one of those earlier e-mails that some white students in his classes feel racially intimidated by these kinds of remarks. Gee, you think?

Also, on June 23, I wrote:

One more thing, Steve.

If you go through Curry’s Academia.edu page, you’ll see that he’s murder on black liberals. Considers them weak, sellouts. It seems to me that Curry, who is clearly a very angry man, loves to play the role of a tough-talking race radical — and that at least some of his colleagues are pleased to have him play that role, for whatever reason. But when others hear or read him, and start taking his rhetoric seriously, suddenly he’s shocked and offended, and colleagues close ranks to defend him. So I wonder: how seriously does Tommy Curry take his own racial rhetoric? How seriously do his colleagues? Or is he simply enjoying the privilege of a philosophy post at Texas A&M to spout off racialist rhetoric and be applauded for it by his professional culture? And is the philosophy faculty enjoying the outré pleasures of having a black radical on faculty at a university that is pretty conservative, but by no means taking that radical’s words seriously? Do both parties think this is some kind of game?

I’m not entirely faulting the reporter here. You can’t include everything in your story. Kolowich tried to follow up with me by phone last week, but I wrestled over whether to take the chance to do a phone interview. Finally it was too late. But he did try to reach out. Still, I want readers to know that there is this context that didn’t make it into the Chronicle story, which is broadly sympathetic to Curry.

Finally, the story’s concluding section talks about horrible things Curry and his family have had to deal with after racist and other crackpot websites learned about his work through my blogs. I didn’t know all that had happened, and it makes me sick. If he’s going to work at Texas A&M, and he is under threat, the university owes him a security detail as surely as Middlebury owed real and effective security to Charles Murray when he came to that campus to deliver a guest lecture. Back in 2008 or thereabouts, an anonymous gay man began to terrorize my house in Dallas, to protest my columns and blog posts defending traditional marriage. The things he did were so scary, and deemed such a clear and present danger to me and my family that my employer, The Dallas Morning News, generously hired off-duty Dallas police officers to stay outside my home 24-7 for several days, guarding it.

The fact that one gay sicko repeatedly threatened me and my family like that does not in any way taint the criticism of those columns voiced online and elsewhere by readers of the News, both gay and straight, who disagreed with my point of view. There were plenty of people who disagreed strongly, but only a few who did so in truly abusive or threatening terms — and only one who actually made good on his threats. I said nothing in those blogs that was untrue about what Professor Curry wrote or said — and I provided links to the original broadcasts and documents so readers could judge for themselves.

Are conservatives supposed to refrain from criticizing the public words of academic radicals because somewhere, there might be disgusting people who would learn about the radical’s words through the criticism, and threaten the radical? This is what we call a “heckler’s veto” — the idea that something ought not to be said because it might trigger someone into acting inappropriately. It is horrible what has happened to Tommy Curry. No radical black professor, no radical white nationalist (Richard Spencer), no one at all, deserves to be physically attacked, intimidated, or threatened for stating their opinions, no matter how objectionable. But neither do they have the right to expect no criticism.

Social peace is not the norm in human society. It’s a hard-won thing. It seems to me that the kind of thing that both Curry and I have experienced from fringe haters is part of a dissolution of norms in our culture. More and more, it seems, people believe that as a matter of protecting their own identity, and of standing up for justice, anything they do to silence those who have offended them is justified. In the pro-life movement, there is a tiny fringe that believes violence against abortion providers is justified to save the lives of unborn children. You can see the logic. But the mainstream pro-life organizations and leaders have strongly objected to this. When a pro-life Massachusetts man back in the 1990s shot abortion clinic workers, New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor, who was fiercely pro-life, publicly invited any pro-life would-be assassins to shoot him instead of abortion clinic workers. Cardinal O’Connor knew that entertaining the idea of violence to advance a political goal was incredibly dangerous.

“War is the continuation of politics by other means,” said Clausewitz. Tommy Curry seems to understand that; after all, he asked in that 2007 paper, of his fellow African-Americans, “do we advocate the end of racism, even if the means to do so is war?” What he doesn’t understand, but the late Cardinal O’Connor did, is that we have to be extremely careful when talking about the use of violence for present political goals. The hothouse of the academy may well be so insular that it is accustomed to treating this kind of spiteful discourse as normative when it comes from racial or sexual minorities. But that is not the real world. Unlike many white academics, there are fewer whites outside colleges and universities who believe that non-whites calling for their violent suppression, even murder, for the sake of settling historic racial accounts, is to be welcomed.

I have said for a long time that the academic left has no idea the kinds of demons it is calling up by trafficking in this rhetoric. I took down one long post I worked on about Curry back when this controversy first arose, not because I had said anything I regretted, but because I heard that things were getting really hot on campus, and I wanted to take the temperature down a notch. But if he’s talking to the Chronicle, then we can and should talk about the situation again.

I’ll leave this long post with this link to a recent blog post by Freddie de Boer, an academic who is a bona fide leftist. Not a liberal, a real leftist. But he has consistently spoken out about the culture of left-wing censorship on campus. He writes that his fellow academic leftists simply will not deal with the fact that leftists routinely drive mainstream conservative opinions off of campus. He offers a number of examples. And then he says:

The obsession with Milo and Richard Spencer makes this conversation impossible in left circles. Those people are discussed endlessly because leftists believe that doing so makes it easy to argue – “what, you want Milo to be free to harass POC on campus?!?” But in fact because most conservatives on campus will simply be mainstream Republicans, this side conversation will be almost entirely pointless. What really matters is the way that perfectly mainstream positions are being run out of campus on a regular basis. And of course with a list like this we can be sure that there are many, many more cases that went unnoticed and unreported in the wider world.

You would think it would be easy for progressives and leftists simply to say “I support many actions that campus protesters take, but these censorship efforts are counterproductive and wrong.” But that almost never happens. That’s because in contemporary life, politics has almost nothing to do with principle, or even with political tactics. Instead it has to do with aligning yourself with the right broad social circles. To criticize specific actions of campus activists sounds to too many leftists like being “the wrong kind of person,” so they refuse to criticize students even when their actions are minimally helpful and maximally counterproductive. That in turn ensures that there’s no opportunity for the students to reflect, learn, and evolve.

I have no idea where de Boer stands on the Tommy Curry situation. I don’t think Tommy Curry should be fired — or if he should be fired, it’s not because he says obnoxious things, but because he’s a bad teacher (if he is in fact a bad teacher, I mean). But the expectation that campus leftists have that left-wing professors and activists ought not be criticized for what they say and do because to do that would mark you as the wrong kind of person — this is completely untenable. Does any leftist or liberal on TAMU’s campus believe that his stated views and rhetoric is helpful and productive to the mission of the university? Does anybody believe that his blunt racialism offers students the opportunity to reflect, learn, and evolve? What does it say to the taxpayers of Texas, who are funding the university, about the university’s priorities?

Or: Could this be entirely about Tommy Curry getting a thrill from pissing off white people, as his graduate adviser said he does, and advancing his career in a professional culture that huffs radical chic like a 14-year-old suburban metalhead huffs glue?

The distance between the academy and the society in which it is embedded is significant. This controversy is a sign of that.

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92 Responses to The Tommy Curry Situation

“…Does the black individual have a need to protect himself from police officers?’ We don’t have that conversation at all.”

There is an extensive literature on the connection between early gun control efforts and a desire blacks, the use of guns by blacks to protect themselves from terrorists like the klan, et… by gun rights advocates such as the folks at volokh. One may disagree with their analysis, but that “conversation” is certainly on going.

“The difference is that Spencer has at least some influence on a leading member of Trump’s White House (Miller). Curry doesn’t worry me, as he has no real power to implement his agenda as much,”

You do realize that Obama hosted Ta-Nehasi Coates on multiple occasions in the White House. Furthermore, Coates was given a platform of immense prestige and influence in the Atlantic. It is my belief that Coates is a primary reason for much of black America’s anger leading up to the BLM riots of 2014 and 2015. And Coates is basically of the same mindset as Curry. Especially, if you notice, how the white Polish author of the Chronicle article was heavily tilted towards Curry and against Dreher, Coates pulled off a similar feat in regards to the editors of The Atlantic.

” incarcerated black criminals have been through the criminal justice system. Doesn’t mean that every one received a fair trial and were convicted justly, but still, the comparison is mendacious.”

According to Bill Stuntz (unfortunately deceased, but a brilliant, highly regarded, evangelical, conservative legal academic formerly at Harvard) only about 5% of those in prison received a jury trial. Doesn’t mean 95% don’t belong there, but we really do have serious problems with our criminal justice system. Furthermore a third of black men will spend tome behind bars at some point in their life. Equating this to slavery is obviously hyperbole, but that hyperbloe points to a very troubling reality.

[NFR: Yes, I agree, we have a problem. Equating it to slavery, though, is an easy way to get people to ignore it. — RD]

” Wow. Never knew you could get a university position for what is nothing more than trolling.

And a lot of my black friends in medicine and science will have as much contempt for this dude that I do.”

Have you read the stuff on STEM education coming out of researchers in science departments? A not insignificant portion of it is all about diamantling cis-heteronormative white maleness. Check out statements coming out of scientific professional societies embracing “intersectionality”. This stuff is everywhere.

“And a lot of my black friends in medicine and science will have as much contempt for this dude that I do.””

One interesting thing I have noticed is that, to use a Chinese term, the “white left” likes to use black-Americans as a cudgel to get what they want. And most dear to their heart are LGBT issues. I still remember when the California gay marriage prop went down due to black religious voters and the rage that white gays directed towards them. Ultimately, we know who holds the power and the wealth.

As someone who is not a degrees philosopher but who has studied a lot of philosophy at the university level (mostly the Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel and Foucault), I believe I’ve studied enough of the real thing to assert that this boiler-plate spouting clown is not any form of philosopher. The position he holds is just more evidence that the cancer afflicting this sick society is getting worse. The intellectual step down from Foucault who didn’t die all that long ago to this fraud is too depressing to contemplate.

I believe that the basic question here is: whether black persons in the US ought to be able to defend themselves from aggressors, even if those threatening or attacking them are white, even if their assailants are police officers acting lawlessly?

If the answer is an unqualified “yes” then it’s hard for me to understand what all the fuss is about. Remember: there is an argument, sound or unsound, that the right now recognized in the 2d Amendment is the core of the Bill of Rights. If a white person threatens or attacks a black person then may the black person defend himself, even if the force used against her/him is deadly and the perpetrator is white? If not, why not? And getting too the crux of the argument: Does this apply even if the assailant is a poIice officer? Is it the case that white people facing death at the hands of a police officer have no recourse to self-defense either?

To the point: Is it a given in this discussion that police officers have an absolute power to take lethal action, even based on bad judgment or mistaken perceptions of who’s posing a threat, & that the unfortunate person erroneously deemed a lethal threat is to have no recourse except a 14th Amendment lawsuit by his survivors?

Prof. Curry uses inflammatory language to assert a right that I presume a majority of Americans wouldn’t see as the least bit controversial were the races of those interacting reversed.

What, in the logic of the argument beneath all the hyperventilation here, am I missing?

Re: It is my belief that Coates is a primary reason for much of black America’s anger leading up to the BLM riots of 2014 and 2015.

People who riot tend not to be people who spend much time reading anything. Coates is from Baltimore, there’s even a mural of him on the side of a building up in West Baltimore (building-side murals are a thing here) but I would not be surprised in a major fraction of the teenage brats who looted stores and the like in April 2015 gave you a hollow look if you mentioned Coates’ name.

Prof. Curry uses inflammatory language to assert a right that I presume a majority of Americans wouldn’t see as the least bit controversial were the races of those interacting reversed.

I fully support self-defense, and recognize a legitimate point that its a more poignant issue at times for Americans of African descent. But, its not clear to me whether Curry advocates the right of self defense, or is proposing an offensive campaign of partial extermination. (Not all “whites,” just a fair number to make a point.) Or, perhaps he is, as he says, describing a process he sees at work, rather than advocating anything — but I find he makes a rather thin case for that.

Anti-slavery feeling was high in the rank and file of the Southern armies.

The average confederate soldier had no love for it…..they just didn’t like foreign armies lead by Lincoln invading their homelands and taking control of their states.

Like many northern abolitionists, those southerners who had no love for slavery generally had no love for the Negro either. Get them out of here was more the sentiment. Or slaughter them wholesale, and then slavery won’t be an issue anymore, but no, no love lost for the monetary losses to slave owners.

The confederacy actually couldn’t keep enough troops in the field to win the war — that is attested to by many outraged editorials in southern newspapers about the lack of commitment to the cause among young southern manhood, and the fact that the confederacy resorted to conscription in 1862, forcing the federal government to follow suit in 1863.

I do consider the confederate dead a sacrifice to the abolition of slavery, not because they in any sense fought to abolish slavery, but in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. It was part of the sacrifice the nation as a whole incurred by not effectively dealing with slavery in 1787, or 1803, or 1815, or 1840, when there were opportunities to do so at less cost, with not much morally pristine clarity, but some pragmatic feasibility.

Black Panthers. Definitely had a “negative side”, torture and murder for starters.

So has the United States Army. Also the Roman Catholic Church. I believe I mentioned Shadow of the Panther as a valid reference work, and it makes your point quite well. But that isn’t the entire story of what inspired people to join the BPP, what it accomplished, or what it stood for.

And Coates is basically of the same mindset as Curry.

Could you elucidate that point? Rod devoted some extensive coverage to Coates some time back, and it seems to me that the extensive citations, commentary, and the various posts we all appended, showed a considerable difference between Coates and Curry. There was a lot to criticize about Coates, but not so uniformly, and it took more work to examine his points. They were not basically the same mindset.

Gays and white liberals who like to pat themselves on the back for supporting “the civil rights movement of our time,” like to think they are the heirs of Martin Luther King and the SCLC. They are not. They hate to be reminded that wrapping themselves in a specious analogy won’t cut it.

1) Is a philosopher ruminating on whether deaths may be necessary to end oppression really much different than a philosopher in the Just War tradition ruminating on whether state sanctioned deaths may be necessary to restore stability/justice/freedom in Syria or Iraq?

2) Which of A) or B) is a more plausible claim?:

A) five generations after slavery ended (by war), and two generations removed from segregation laws all but explicitly intended to prevent any black progress, and a few decades from de facto KKK control of numerous southern towns and black churches were frequently torched, and where current legal (school funding, criminal sentencing, policing tactics, etc) and cultural forces (private sector hiring practices, Fox News/Breitbart/etc dog-whistling their way to ratings success) are still keeping the boot on the throat of black Americans, it is fair to call what black Americans experience oppression. Sure there was a recent two term black POTUS, but that led to the reintroduction of explicitly racist lingo in the south, a fear based GOP, not to mention an internet full of straight up racist alt-righters, and the absurd and widespread birther conspiracy. He was followed by a president who plays unsubtle footsy with white supremacists. Black Americans have reason to question their place in the American project.

B) Despite decades of having to deal with Deists in power and modernisms in their own churches, American conservative Christians retained a powerful voice in American life until the sixties, when cultural shifts including the sexual revolution, and religious changes including secularization, led to a decline in their influence. A generation ago, prayer in schools looked to be on the way out for good. Sex Ed curriculum started reflecting values foreign to them. Hollywood was the true cultural power, and it was hostile to anything culturally conservative. A brief period of renewed political influence followed, though those in power didn’t get them anything significant from their wish list (overturning Roe, stopping gay rights progress including maintaining trad definition of marriage). Today, America’s most beloved celebrity is gay (Ellen), and even transgender identity requires public celebration. There are new public costs to espousing conservative Christian social values, including jeopardized career progress, and possible new losses are on the horizon (tax exempt status for conservative schools and even churches perhaps). American conservative Christian are oppressed. Sure, one of there own was POTUS 2001-2009, and the current POTUS is heiled as a dream President by some of their leaders, but conservative Christians ought to reevaluate their role in the American project, given the hostility they face, and take the Benedict Option.

I don’t know, Rod. I hear a lot of similarities between you and Curry. You’ve delivered a lot of snark in the last three days through your NFR comments, especially on this thread, most of them directed at liberals who are thinking through the issues rather than at the conservatives who have adopted your sky-is-falling hypothesis or participated in a tribalism you take pains to avoid on the level of ideas but express through your conviction that liberals with power cannot be trusted or worked with. You are contributing to the hyper-partisanship and the loss of tolerance that you bemoan. I see you trying to resist the partisanship and intolerance but failing. You’re angry that the nation isn’t living up to your ideals, and you blame monoliths like “liquid modernity” and “individualism” rather than looking at the lives of people—including your enemies—making a difference. Like Curry, you see a monolithic entity bearing down and trying to destroy your people. Like him, you can’t see the good in others. Like him, you have given up on country full of people of good will. You’re not alone, of course. Plenty of commenters feel the same way, but you, like Curry, have encouraged them to think this way.

[NFR: Even if what you say is true — and I dispute it — I *still* don’t say that we are living in a Christian genocide or a “slavetocracy” of Christians, one that can only be solved by cleansing violence. — RD]

Is anyone else surprised at how badly the good professor writes? I’m used to humanities writing that’s jargon-filled and awkward, but Prof. Curry seems (from the quotations here) to have problems with simple English grammar and stylistics.

Anti-slavery feeling was high in the rank and file of the Southern armies.

In the age of Trump, wild statements that run counter to reality are common, but this may just top the list. I have never seen a scintella of evidence that this might be true, but plenty that the institution of slavery and virulent racial oppression was supported by Confederates of all ranks.

Black people are not in jail because they are black; they are there because they are convicted criminals. If their incarceration rate is out of proportion to their prevalence in the population, there is an excellent reason: they commit proportionally more crime.

This is not racism; it is the natural response of honest citizens to barbarism.

VikingLS, I have a hard time believing you don’t know exactly what I am talking about. We can make this simple if you answer two questions:

1. Do you agree with most gun rights groups (who are mostly white and conservative) that the purpose of the 2nd amendment and/or the Founder’s purpose for it is for individuals to defend themselves from hostile citizens and even the government itself if it infringes on an individual’s or community’s liberty?

2a. If the answer to 1. Is yes, does the 2nd amendment apply to blacks and whites equally?

2b. If the answer is no, then where is your outrage at these groups advocating violence?

If Curry really believed what he says, he’d be writing his nonsense from prison while serving a life sentence. I suppose he hopes he can inspire someone else to violence (and the consequences thereof), but he’s got it pretty cushy and won’t be wielding the pitchfork himself.

Progressives love to mock conservatives for denying empirical evidence. In my opinion, progressives have a more diabolical approach to dealing with uncomfortable facts – rather than just denying the obvious and looking like fools, they go to great pains to conceal the evidence from everyone, all in the name of “protecting vulnerable minorities.”

For example, the Obama administration made it very difficult for ordinary citizens to find out that most cross-racial violent crime (in which the victim and perps are of different races) is committed by black people on white people, rather than the other way around. The statistics on rape are particularly startling.

The same dishonesty permeates progressive attitudes to Islam and gender.

“620,000 Americans on both Union and Confederate sides gave their lives to defeat slavery.”

On “both Union and Confederate sides?” I’ve seen this number and phrasing before, but obviously no one on the Confederate side gave their lives to defeat slavery.

[NFR: Of course they didn’t. What I meant was that they died in the war that defeated slavery. The point is that there was a horrific cost to the nation. — RD]

Rod, what you meant isn’t what you said. I believe you when you say you meant to say something else about the cost of the war (although not having the war would have resulted in a more horrific cost), but your use of that particular number and phrasing is weird to me coming from you.

I say that because I have encountered “620,000 died to end slavery’ many times while talking to overt racists and people under the sway of Confederate myth both in-person and online. In my experience, it is usually an unfortunate riposte to someone talking about an evil inflicted by white people upon black people. They think they are being clever and funny with “620,000 white people died to free blacks. And this is the thanks we get?” or some variation while I’m having a Seinfeld moment and feeling more offended as a history enthusiast than as a black person.

Again, because I’ve been reading your work for awhile, I believe you when you say what you meant to say. But what you actually said is plainly wrong and frequently said in some form by contemptible people. Seeing that 620,000 number and the “both” from you was odd and unexpected.

On another note, as a moderator, you do see the examples in the comments of people who find it plausible that Confederates “gave their lives to end slavery,” right?

[NFR: Again, what I meant is that the conflict that ended slavery took 620,000 lives. The lives of soldiers who fought on the wrong side of that war mattered to their families too. — RD]

Black people are not in jail because they are black; they are there because they are convicted criminals.

Its not that simple. If it were, the answers would be easy. I know many families of various complexions, who have dealt with mom or dad or brother or sister or grandma or auntie being in prison. I know how capricious the criminal justice system can be, sometimes in convicting the innocent, sometimes in convicting people with a passing participation in a vast criminal conspiracy for the full scope of the crimes of others, sometimes in imposing sentences far in excess of what any reasonable person would call justice.

I also live in a city where there are daily murders, rapes, carjackings, innocent children killed every month or so by stray bullets, and yes, most of the perpetrators are black, as are most of the victims.

There are some disparities. They are not the disparities of innocent black people being railroaded to prison on little or no evidence. They are the disparities that black perpetrators are a little more likely to be caught, innocent black people a little more likely to be framed after being found in the wrong place at an unfortunate time, and those convicted, rightly are wrongly, are likely to receive somewhat longer sentences. It all adds up. There is also the fact that in any given community, the economically less fortunate niches in the community are more likely to be filled by black people, if there are black people to fill them. In communities where there are few or no black people, these niches are filled perfectly well by white people, and yes, poor whites do go to prison at a disproportionate rate compared to more prosperous white people.

The solution, is not, of course, “free all the black prisoners.” A lot of black families would be outraged if certain black prisoners were released before serving their full sentence. Part of the solution is reducing economic disparities, and that’s something that takes decades, but would move faster if we actually had a will to do that. Part of the solution is training police to a fine razor’s edge about when and how to use legitimate force when it is legitimate, while generally treating those they encounter with the respect due to their employers — the taxpayers who paid for their guns, uniforms, generous salaries, and rather good benefits packages. Part of it, perhaps, is beyond the ability of the law to redress — Barry Goldwater was not entirely wrong when he said you cannot legislate what is in the human heart, but he was wrong about where to draw the line.

A final note: Hector has cited reasonably reliable statistics that black populations are statistically more likely to commit crimes, and a component of this is genetic. That would leave SOME statistical disparity, and as I’ve said several times, disparate impact is not in itself evidence of racism. But this statistical difference still leaves an overwhelming majority of both populations rather unlikely to commit crimes, absent other circumstances.

Rod, last week, you linked to an article from Carl Trueman in which he talked about how religious conservatives must give up their idol of sports (football) in order to keep their colleges true to their faith. That was of course true and the same principle applies in this situation. It’s common knowledge that TAMU is among the most conservative colleges in the country. I can’t help but wonder what would happen in this situation if the hundred thousand + TAMU football fans (the large majority of whom are political / religious conservatives) voted with their feet and wallets by withholding their giving to the TAMU athletic dept and stopped attending / supporting the football team? Sadly of course, I’m dreaming and this will never happen, not in a million years. Which reveals what most of us conservatives truly value.

Another black militant advocating taking up arms against the white oppressor. Here is my caveat for all these black warriors: war is a complicated and expensive thing, and it is my experience that black society is not good at anything; educating black children, rehabilitating the black family, accumulating wealth and power, gaining respect by straight-forward accomplishment. Blacks endlessly assert that they need help with all manner of things. Asian-Americans often succeed far more in one generation here than blacks have done in the century and a half since the civil war.
Armed action against mainstream society will get people hurt, but I’m betting the ‘professor’ won’t be one of those people; he will be safe in his Black Studies hangout for as long as we permit “Studies departments” to parasitize American Academe.

So these kinds of conversations need to start coming out into the open, and make no mistake that police brutality against whites IS a white community issue, not necessarily a black community issue, in order to diffuse the situation and make suggestions like Curry’s look like nonsense.

I know what you’re getting at, but I disagree with how you phrase it. Police abuse of authority should be an issue for all of us, regardless of the “race” of the perpetrators or the victims. It makes a mockery of both our vaunted “liberty” and the rule of law. I need it no racial epithets from the police officers beating Rodney King to know that it was wrong. Nor did I need any academic gibbering
about “structural racism.” As long as we keep looking at this problem in “race” terms there will be no solution. In this and other posts, you alluded to an incident in which you were a victim of police misconduct. In one of those posts, you said that the response of other white people to your situation was “worse than racism.” What, exactly did you mean? Are white people more deferential to police officers, or do they value obedience to authority more than other people? Is this, and not racism, the cause of the difference in “black” and “white” opinion on this question? I’m not sure, but you may be on to something.

Note to RD: you probably have no control of this, but I think the combox software would be more useful if it allowed people to thread their remarks to previous commenters remarks.

Second what A.G. Philbin says, which means seconding MOST of what Mia says.

There is no such thing as “the white community.” There isn’t really a “black community” that would hold together with any unity or coherence if not for the enduring history that “if we don’t stick together, the white folks will tear us apart.” The less true that is, the more the “black community” will cease to exist. Even with extensive patterns of segregated housing, its pretty thin on the ground, although still very much in daily speech.

[NFR: Even if what you say is true — and I dispute it — I *still* don’t say that we are living in a Christian genocide or a “slavetocracy” of Christians, one that can only be solved by cleansing violence. — RD]

But you do say things along this line, all the time. What else is the Law of Merited Impossibility or the following refrain?

“The activist left won’t be happy until the last conservative Christian cleric is strangled with the entrails of the last Evangelical cake baker and the last Little Sister of the Poor. — RD”

You frequently imagine the destruction of conservative Christianity. You don’t ask for violence, but you only fitfully call out your conservative readers. And whenever someone describes how conservatives and liberals can work and are working together, you call them naïve.

You’ve said in the past that you’re a lot less angry in person than people seem to think based on your persona in your blog. This discrepancy suggests to me there’s something about the genre you’ve chosen that inspires a pessimism and unwillingness to work with others for the common good. You’ve reached out across denominational lines in admirable ways, but something prevents you from making common cause with those you see as your enemies. What is it?

[NFR: The “activist left” line of mine is a riff on a statement by the revolutionary Frenchman Denis Diderot, who said, “Man will never truly be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” My idea was to use it to mock the extremism of SJWs today. To anyone familiar with that quote, mine wasn’t a literal statement. You would be hard pressed to read Curry’s paper and to believe that he was using comic hyperbole. — RD]

“If there is no peaceful break up of the Union into at least 1 Red State confederacy and 1 Blue state nation”

Which part of Scalia’s “settled at Appomattox” is to you unclear? What of “one nation” and “indivisible” do you understand not? Chief Justice Salmon Chase said in majority decision in [I]Texas v. White[/I]:

The Union of the States never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation. It began among the Colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form and character and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these, the Union was solemnly declared to “be perpetual.” And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained “to form a more perfect Union.” It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?…
…When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final.

(The emphasis added.)
So the “peaceful break up” is impossible, because any “break up of the Union” has been set down in absolute Law like carved into stone that any division of United States has been ruled illegal and completely forbidden, no matter the reason, for all time. Thus, any “break up” shall be a great and grievous crime, and a crime cannot be “peaceful”. Even beyond that, too many will, in defense of above reasoning, fight, with the military force if needed, any break up, no matter how “peaceful” tries it to be at start.

“the next time the Dems control the White House and both houses of Congress, all Hell will break lose against us.”

Indeed it will, and there looks not to be anything you can do to stop it.

>>Redbrick

“There is nothing conservative about A&M leadership and its professors.”

Is there anything the “conservative” about leadership at any American university? I’m asking not the rhetorical. Is there? What universities?

>>Rossbach

“This is not racism; it is the natural response of honest citizens to barbarism.”

But if the “honest citizens” Americans are really responding to fight the “barbarism”, why does America have so much of it?

>>Janwaar Bibi

“rather than just denying the obvious and looking like fools, they go to great pains to conceal the evidence from everyone, all in the name of “protecting vulnerable minorities.””

Did not the San Francisco’s BART refuse to release their surveillance tapes recordings of crimes to avoid “perpetuating stereotypes”?

>>Siarlys Jenkins

“I also live in a city where there are daily murders, rapes, carjackings, innocent children killed every month or so by stray bullets”

Why? Why live in such a place? Why not flee the barbarity, to someplace that is actually civilized? You don’t see this sort of thing in East Asia, do you? There are none “no go zones” in the cities of Japan.

Why live in such a place? Why not flee the barbarity, to someplace that is actually civilized?

Ummm… because this is my home? Because I know a lot of highly civilized people striving to improve their lives, and I want to be part of that? Because I care about the children who have not had the mischance to stop a bullet? Because the suburbs are a very fragile peace that could easily be upended?

As for Japan, I haven’t seen much lately about Japan’s “untouchable” class, or the Ainu, but you might find some similar dysfunction there.

Correct about the perpetual union though. As Andrew Jackson told his cabinet, with pointed reference to John C. Calhoun, “The United States is a government, not a league.”

“Because the suburbs are a very fragile peace that could easily be upended?”

And how is that not a further barbarism to be corrected? Do you see such “very fragile peace” in East Asian towns?

“As for Japan, I haven’t seen much lately about Japan’s “untouchable” class, or the Ainu, but you might find some similar dysfunction there.”

The eta are “untouchable” for very good reason, but even they come not near the spectacular and violent criminality of America’s “inner cities” and underclasses. Briefest review of crime statistics of both countries will show that is so. And still, why cannot American police emulate Japanese police? Why cannot Baltimore or wherever be made as peaceful and orderly as Osaka or Tokyo, or even just close? Are Americans simply too much barbarians by the nature to ever be properly civilized?

Anti-slavery feeling was high in the rank and file of the Southern armies.

James McPherson examined about 25,000 letters from soldiers who fought in the Civil War. Of the Southern sample, not a single one — not one single letter from a Confederate soldier — opposed slavery (Why Men Fought, p 110).

[NFR: I would be very, very surprised to learn that any significant number of Southern soldiers were against slavery. — RD]

There are many interesting and disturbing aspects to this story. The aspect I wish to address is the fallacious association with “leftist” of these abhorrent, morally and logically incoherent racist screeds. Words have meanings. What Curry has expressed is racism.
Last time I checked, progressives were against racism. It is the principle that matters. Progressives supporting victims of racism CANNOT in turn accept racism as acceptable from those victims. That seems simple enough and yet we have debacles like Curry being taken seriously as an academic and the absurd meltdown at Evergreen in Washington. The attack on leftists/liberals/progressives by identity groups those leftists have been supporting is a rush limbaugh wet dream. It is nearly impossible not to view these movements as a giant deep mole covert false flag extreme right wing conspiracy, they are that absurd and self-destructive.
I categorically reject acceptance of racial hate, discrimination and bias in any direction as left, or liberal, or progressive. It is instead an ignorant authoritarian and totalitarian position. It is completely against progressive values.
Thinking leftist groups at colleges in particular need to get a handle on this. It is categorically OK to be whatever color you are. It is categorically not OK to in any way abuse anyone based on their color. Anything else is racist and is morally and politically unacceptable. Corrective, punitive, or compensatory racial abuse is simply and unacceptably wrong. No one is responsible retroactively for the actions of their ancestors. What everyone is responsible for is justice in the world they find themselves in. An acute awareness of history is important in understanding why we find ourselves where we are and could be useful in guidance toward the future. But it is the future that people now are responsible for.

Ken’ichi, are you advocating massive American migration to Japan? The country had enough trouble with ethnic Japanese who were third generation Brazilians, who tried moving “home” when the Brazilian economy tanked while the Japanese economy was on its way up (temporarily as it turned out). I understand it brought a lot of Latin music and cooking, and a lot of cultural friction.

You are good at taking sentences out of the paragraph in which they appear, and sanctimoniously overlooking the main point entirely. Yes, the suburbs are a barbarism to be corrected. Hopefully this can be done peacefully over time, rather than, e.g., by a melodramatic mass march out of the inner city. I would start by providing that no farmland can be converted to industrial or residential use while empty factories and empty lots remain in nearby cities.

The eta are untouchable for “very good reason” are they? What reason is that, pray tell? In America, we get along just fine living next door to people who work in slaughterhouses or tan leather for a living.

“My idea was to use it to mock the extremism of SJWs today. To anyone familiar with that quote, mine wasn’t a literal statement. You would be hard pressed to read Curry’s paper and to believe that he was using comic hyperbole. — RD]”

You call it comic hyperbole, but on some level you believe that the course of Western civilization is hostile and would happily see Christianity disappear. Curry doesn’t use comic hyperbole but does test philosophical propositions. When he says that folks like you don’t understand how he’s practicing philosophy, you scoff. Both of you paint a dire picture to justify your intolerance. Neither of you spend much time imagining a way forward that seeks peace and builds bridges.

The idea we should love our neighbors is common across many religious traditions, but Jesus adds his characteristic twist when he asks us to love our enemies as well. You spend precious little time imagining loving SJWs. But without them, how much thought would conservative Christians have given homosexuals, the transgendered, blacks, slaves, women? The challenge for conservative Christian organizations is how to be genuinely contrite about the harm they have done to these groups while still affirming the traditional beliefs they still cherish.

Instead of giving us another post like “On LGBT, Evangelical Colleges At Bargaining Stage,” where you warn against any form of dialogue or compromise, you could explain exactly how conservative Christian institutions can repent of the way they have wronged homosexuals and the transgendered and yet affirm their understanding of orthodoxy. You remain awfully vague about what exactly you want to see going forward.

It’s a shame that folks like Dreher can’t draw attention to this sort of thing without being accused of spreading a white genocide narrative. This accusation takes on a bit of self-undermining irony when the allegedly illicit commentary is little more than a copy and paste of the original.